The Time of Our Singing

  The disk sold quietly. Harmondial was pleased, banking on long-term return on investment. They considered Jonah a buy and hold. We two were stunned that anyone bothered to listen to the thing. “Jesus, Joey! Thousands of people have added us to their record collections, and we don’t even know them. My picture could be pressing up against Geraldine Farrar’s kisser somewhere, even as we speak.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “One of her early pub photos. A nice little Cho-Cho-San.”

  “And somewhere else, you’re pressing up against the tip of Kirsten Flagstad’s spear point.”

  Jonah imagined that, having made a good recording, we had only to sit back and wait for the jobs to pour in. Mr. Weisman did book us more regularly into bigger cities, and we could just about live now on what we made. But week to week, our life was still the same university concert series and festival-dredging it had been before the record appeared.

  I drop the needle onto the first track—Schubert’s “Erl-King,” a Marian Anderson standard—and I circle back into that closed loop. The record spins; the piano gallop resumes. Jonah and I send out the song’s surging message, unchanged. But the people to whom we thought to send it are gone.

  The same president who passed the Civil Rights Act forced through Congress a blank check for widening the war in Asia. Jonah and I carried around our draft cards, nothing if not law-abiding. But the shadow of the call passed over us. We slipped through the minefield, exiting out the far side, too old to be tapped. The summer after our record, Chicago erupted. Three days later, Cleveland followed. It was high July again, just as it had been when we’d laid down the tracks. And once again, the bewildered reporters tried to blame the heat. Civil rights was heading north. The chickens, as Malcolm had said, were coming home to roost. Violence accompanied us, nightly, on our hotel televisions. I stared at the collective hallucination, knowing I was somehow the author of it. Every time I put our record on the turntable to hear what we two had done, another city burned.

  “They’ll have to declare nationwide martial law.” The idea seemed to appeal to Jonah. This was the man who’d lain on the sidewalk of Watts, moving his lips to some ethereal score, waiting to be shot. High Fidelity had just run a feature, “Ten Singers Under Thirty Who Will Change the Way You Listen to Lieder,” naming him to their number-three spot. My brother’s country was just fine. Martial law might even help stabilize our bookings.

  I looked out from the upper stories of antiseptic hotel rooms onto a carousel of cities whose names bled into one another, watching for the next new trickles of smoke. The music that year was still in denial—“I’m a Believer”; “Good Vibrations”; “We Can Work It Out.” Only this time, tens of millions of twenty-year-olds who had been lied to since birth were out in the streets saying no, singing power, shouting burn. I drop the needle down on the tracks of our Wolf songs and hear for the first time where the two of us were. My brother and I, alone, were heading back into that burning building that the rest of the country was racing to evacuate.

  We called Da from San Francisco just before the High Holidays. Not that he ever kept track. Long distance, back then, was still a three-minute civil defense drill, saved for funerals and machine-gunned best wishes. Jonah got on and did a prestissimo recap of our recent concerts. Then I got on and greeted Da with the first few lines of the Kol Nidre in Hebrew, which I’d just learned phonetically out of a book. My accent was so bad, he couldn’t understand me. I asked to talk to Ruth. Da said nothing. I thought he still didn’t understand my English. So I asked again.

  “Your sister has broken with me.”

  “She what? What are you talking about, Da?”

  “She has moved away. Sie hat uns verlassen. Sie ist weg.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Just now.” To Da, that might have meant anything.

  “Where’d she go?” Jonah, standing nearby, quizzed me with a look.

  Da didn’t have the faintest idea.

  “Did something happen? Have the two of you … ?”

  “There was a fight.” I found myself praying he wouldn’t give me details. “The whole country is rebellion. Everything has become revolution. So of course, it’s finally come your sister’s and my turn.”

  “Can’t you get her address from the university? You’re her father. They’ll have to tell you.”

  Shame filled his voice. “She has dropped out of school.” More grief than when he told us, that December day at Boylston eleven years before, that our mother was dead. The first death still fit into his cosmology. This new disaster pushed him over into a place no theories could accommodate. His daughter had disowned him. She had torn loose in some astral discontinuity Da couldn’t comprehend, even as it broke over him.

  “Da? What … what happened? What did you do?”

  “We had a fight. Your sister thinks … We had a fight about your mother.”

  I looked at Jonah, helpless. He held out his hand to take the phone. I gripped the receiver, ready to take it to my grave.

  “I am the evil one.” Da’s voice broke. He’d seen the future, and his children were it. But this disaster had somehow hijacked his vision. “I am the enemy. There is nothing I can do.” All our lives he’d told us, “Run your own race.” Now he knew just how worthless that advice had always been. No one had their own race. No one’s race was theirs to run. “I killed your mother. I ruined the three of you.”

  I could hear my own blood coursing in my ears. Ruth had told our father this. Worse: He’d reached the same conclusion. I felt my lips moving. Any objection I could make would only confirm him. At last I managed to say, “Don’t be crazy, Da.”

  “How did we come here?” he answered.

  I handed Jonah the phone and went to the hotel window. Down in the square below, in the gathering dusk, two street people argued. Jonah talked on to Da for several sentences. “She’ll show up. She’ll be back. Give her two weeks, tops.” After a little gap of listening, he added, “You, too.” Then the call was over.

  Jonah didn’t want to talk about it. So for a long time, we didn’t. He wanted to rehearse. I sounded like shit pushed through a sieve. At last, he smiled at me and gave up. “Joey. Cool it. It’s not the end of the world.”

  “No. Just of our family.”

  Something in him said his family had ended years ago. “Mule. It’s done. It’s not your fault. What are you going to do about it now? Ruth has been working up to this for years. She’s just been waiting for the moment when she could punish us all for being who we are. Bust us for all the things we’ve done to her. Haven’t done. Whatever.”

  “I thought you told Da she’s coming back. You said two weeks.”

  “I meant two weeks in Da years.” He shook his head in a controlled fury. The rage of confirmation. “Our own little sister. She’s resented us for years. She hates everything about us. Everything she thinks we stand for.” Jonah paced in place, trying to breathe normally. He shook his shoulders and shot his clenched fist into the air. “Power to the purple. Light brown is beautiful.”

  “She’s a good deal more than light.” Before he could shut me down, I rushed on. “Poor Rootie.”

  Jonah looked at me, rejected. Then he put his fingers to the bridge of his nose and nodded. “Poor all of us.”

  We went to Jersey to see Da as soon as we were back in the city. We went for dinner, which he insisted on making. I’d never seen the man so shaken. Whatever reason Ruth gave for quitting school and cutting Da off without a forwarding address had destroyed him. Da’s hands shook as he passed the plates to put out on the table. He slumped about the kitchen, apologizing for being. He tried to make the tomato and chicken stew that Mama had loved to make. Da’s smelled like a damp terry-cloth towel.

  Jonah cued up a stack of Italian tenors to accompany dinner. When that distraction didn’t work, he did his best to set the topics. But Da wanted to talk about Ruth. He was a total mess. “She says I am responsible.”


  “For what?”

  Da just waved my question into the ether.

  Jonah lectured at us both. “Let her go where she needs to go. Get out of her way, and she’ll stop blaming you. That’s all she wants. Remember how Mama raised us? ‘Be whatever you want to be.’” I could hear how betrayed he was.

  “That is not what your sister wants. She has told me to my face that your mother died … because she married me.”

  I slammed my fork down on my plate, splattering the stew. “Good God. How can she even …”

  Da went on, talking to no one. “Have I been in terrible error all this time? Did your mother and I do wrong by making you children?”

  Jonah tried to laugh. “Frankly, Da? Yes. Some other set of parents should have made us.”

  Da said only, “Maybe. Maybe.”

  We blasted through what was left of dinner. Jonah and I made short work of the dish cleanup while Da stood by, waving his arms. We talked a little about upcoming concerts. Jonah told Da he was planning to do a Met audition early in the spring. First I’d heard. But then, he’d gotten used to his accompanist reading his mind.

  Ruth came up again only as we readied to leave. “Tell us when you hear from her,” Jonah said. He tried not to sound too eager. “Trust me. She’ll surface. People don’t just cut off their own flesh and blood.” He must have heard what he was saying. But Jonah never even flinched. His acting skill now matched his singing. My brother was ready for any audition he cared to take.

  As we got our coats, Da broke down. “Boys. My boys.” The word, after all his years in this land, still rhymed with choice. “Please stay here tonight. There is so much room in this place. It must be too late to take the train.”

  I checked my watch. Quarter past nine. Jonah was for going. I was for staying. We had two programs to perfect by next week, without enough hours to perfect them. But I wasn’t budging, and Jonah wouldn’t go by himself. Da put Jonah on the living room’s foldout sofa and me on a bedroll on the floor of his study. He didn’t want either of us staying in Ruth’s room. You never knew when the girl might come home in the middle of the night.

  I woke at no hour. Someone had broken into the house. In my half state, I heard the police searching down a tip they’d received about illegal fugitives hiding in the neighborhood. Then it sounded like a conversation, hushed voices in the hours before dawn, planning the day. Then I thought the radio was on, tuned to some lightly accented FM announcer. The accent was my father’s, and I was awake. Da was talking to someone on the other side of the wall, in the kitchen, ten steps away from me. Amber seeped in under the crack of my room’s door. For a moment, Jonah and I were spying on our parents where they whispered together in the old kitchen in Hamilton Heights, the night Jonah’s first boarding school application had been rejected for unstated reasons. Now my father whispered with his firstborn son, while I did the eavesdropping, alone. I pictured Da and Jonah, head-to-head across the breakfast table. I couldn’t figure it: My brother never woke up in the mornings without vast external encouragement. I checked the window: still hours from morning. They weren’t just waking; they hadn’t yet fallen asleep. By some secret signal, they’d arranged to stay up after I went down, to discuss in private things not meant for me.

  I listened. Da was explaining himself. “How has it become greater than family?” I lay in the dark, listening for Jonah’s reply, but there was none. After a pause, Da spoke again. “It cannot be bigger than family. It cannot become bigger than time. I could have told her what we saw. Should I have told her about the child?” I had no idea what he was talking about. Again, I waited for Jonah to answer, and again he didn’t. He’d grown completely helpless without me.

  There was a sound, eerie and grating. At three o’clock in the morning, even “Happy Birthday” sounds terrifying. It took me a few rasps to decide: Da was laughing. Then it wasn’t laughter. Our father was breaking down, and still Jonah said nothing. My hearing swelled until I realized: Jonah wasn’t there. One padded set of footsteps, one clinking spoon against a single teacup, one muffled course of breathing. Da was alone, in his kitchen, in the middle of the night—one of how many nights running? —talking to himself.

  He said, “I did not foresee this. I never saw this would come.” Then he said, “Have we made a mistake? Maybe we have understood all wrong?”

  I froze in my bedroll. There was only one person he could be talking to. Someone who couldn’t answer. I fought down the urge to fling the door open. Anything out there would have killed me. All I could do was lie still in my makeshift bed, afraid even to breathe, straining to hear what answer he might receive. After a while, I heard my father change. He seemed, through the door, to grow lighter. He said, “Yes, that’s so.” In a voice awful with peace, he added, “Yes, I could not forget that.” I heard him stand and move from the table to the sink. He set the dishes onto the porcelain. He stood there for some time, no doubt gazing out the darkened window above the sink. A groan escaped him. “But our little girl!” He didn’t wait for an answer now, but padded out of the kitchen and down the hallway, to his room.

  I never fell back asleep. I dressed at last with dawn and went out into the transformed kitchen. There, in the sink, were two of everything: two cups, two saucers, two spoons.

  The whole bus ride back to the city, I sat next to Jonah, needing to ask if he’d heard, not wanting to ask, in the event that he hadn’t. Our father talked to a phantom. He set out a coffee cup for her. Perhaps he talked to her all the time, nightly, when we weren’t there, as if they both still had full days to compare. So long as neither Jonah nor I said anything, I might have invented everything. When we got off at Port Authority, Jonah said, “He’ll never hear from her again.” Only when he added, “She might as well be dead” did I realize he meant Ruth.

  I figured that she would have to call us. Whatever Ruth imagined that Da had done to her, he’d done to us, as well. Only now did I see how out of touch we had drifted the last three years, while Jonah and I were on the road. I called so infrequently, usually just birthdays and holidays. I’d always been able to reach Ruth, even if I rarely did. I could not believe that she really wanted to hurt any of us. But with each day out of touch, I began to see how badly I’d refused her, just by living as I lived.

  Weeks went by and we heard nothing. It occurred to me that she must have gotten into trouble. There was something in the papers every day. People were constantly getting arrested for making speeches, holding rallies, printing pamphlets—all the things Ruth excelled at and had so taken to since starting college. I had nightmares that she was being held in an underground cell where the guards wouldn’t let me see her because the name I gave them didn’t match the one they had on the list.

  Jonah took his Met audition. I was to play for him, quavering piano reductions of pit orchestra tutti. I felt like an Italian organ-grinder. “Let me get this straight. I’m supposed to help you put me out of a job?”

  “I get a contract with these people, Mule, and we’ll make an honest man out of you.”

  “Tell me again why you want to do this?” His voice was about light, air, and upper altitudes, not about power, mass, and histrionics. He sang lieder as if Apollo were whispering into his ear on the fly. Opera seemed perverse. Like forcing a magnificent racehorse into armor for a joust. Not to mention that he hadn’t studied it in years.

  “Why? You’re kidding, right? It’s Everest, Mule.”

  By which he meant high, white, and cold. Then again, it was steady work. We’d been breaking hearts on the recital circuit for years, and we’d run through all our mother’s insurance legacy. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was time to make a living.

  Jonah must have imagined he’d be singing for Mr. Bing himself. Sir Rudolph, however, had other things on his plate the day Jonah did his fire walk. But alerted by Peter Grau, Jonah’s old teacher, the casting people did give him a special listen. Jonah spent the better part of an afternoon passed from one merciless set of ears to another, sin
ging in spaces in the bowels of the new Lincoln Center that ranged from gym-squeaky to bone-dead. Sometimes I played for him. Sometimes he sang a cappella. They ran him through a gamut of sight-singing. Sitting at the keys, I knew that if I played well, my reward would be never to accompany my brother again.

  I played well. But not as well as my brother sang. That afternoon, he sounded as if he’d been sandbagging for all our last six months on the road. He did more to seduce these judges than he’d done for full houses in Seattle and San Francisco. He sailed up to the roundest sounds he knew how to make. The jaded New York set squirmed, trying to pretend there wasn’t something special going on. People kept asking where he’d sung, what roles, under whom. Everyone was dumbstruck with his answer. “You’ve never soloed in a choral work? Never sung in front of an orchestra?”

  It probably would have been shrewd to stretch the truth a little. But Jonah couldn’t help it. “Not since childhood,” he admitted.

  They gave him da Ponte Mozart. He romped through it on a lark. They gave him meaty Puccini breast-beaters. He aired them out. They didn’t know how to position him. They passed him up to a senior casting director, Crispin Linwell. Linwell studied my brother like a man regarding a rack of magazines, the heels of his black leather boots apart, hornrim glasses pushed up on his forehead, the arms of a cardigan tied around his neck. He made Jonah sing the opening strains of “Auf Ewigkeit,” from Parsifal, cutting him off after a few bars. He sent his aides upstairs on a raiding mission to steal a favorite soprano, Gina Hills, out of a closed rehearsal. The woman came into the room cursing roundly. Crispin Linwell waved her down. “My dear, we need you for a noble experiment.”

  Miss Hills calmed a little when she learned that the experiment involved the first love duet from act two of Tristan. She wanted Isolde, and thought this trial was hers. Linwell insisted on playing the piano reduction. He set them a smoldering tempo, then let the two of them loose.